Hello everyone, and welcome to SOCVR's 4th room meeting. I'm gunr2171 and I'll be the MC for the event. We'll be unlocking the room in just a moment, we just need to get some stuff out of the way first.

General reminder: please be nice to each other. No biting, no name calling, and no unauthorized plopping while the event is in progress.

Please keep the conversation on topic, and the no one-box rule applies here. Please use stars sparingly.

Chat recently got a new feature: RO's can now put the room in timeout. We will be abusing using this to help mark the end of sections.

The room will be in timeout for 60 seconds after this intro, and for 2 minutes on each topic after we feel that there is nothing more to add to the conversation so that we can write up a proper conclusion.

A lot has happened since April. We have seen new members join and some regulars reduce their visits. Overall it was uneventful (it was, right?). We have done a couple of burninations, we have evaluated and established the burnination process on meta. We’ve had a long-standing wish implemented for a month or so, MOAR close votes!

The outcome was a learning experience for all of us. Our room members are both vocal and active on meta as well. We see the more focussed spin-offs Campaigns and SOCVFinder flourish with their dedicated crew and cross-overs. Those who want to moderate have enough options to choose from.

Hiya all! I'm πάντα ῥεῖ, the guy with the weird greek letters nick. I'm interested mainly to discuss the new documentation thing here, though I'm still totally clueless how this is going to work currently.

The option reject-pls, flag-pls for example are still welcomed in the room. You just need to type it. IMO, the other options are infrequent enough that you can just type them when wanted, there's no need to automate it.

Summary of my thoughts: (1) Yay on reject-please, meh on approve-please, (2) let the script name be a guide, not a rule, (3) nay on adding stuff to the script unless it's stuff the room actually wants to handle.

I would disallow the use of the !!/allspam or such from the room. It implies leaving a link to a user, and it implies that members needs to check the content of the user. This slips very easily to the tricky "but they're all spam" to the "moderate that user", "its comments", "its edit".... and it gets blurier. So the simple rule for me would be: no links whatsoever to user profiles. If allspam, report them as indivual posts, if all bad edits, reject-pls as individual posts.

My climbing harness could break; the tower could fall on my head. Should I not go climbing because of those risks? Or should I mitigate them the best I can, and react retrospectively to any issues that do come up?

I think the core reason for avoiding user links in the transcript is when people start to get angry at the room. If we close a single post we can defend that easily. If we post a user and say "go through that person" then it's a pattern that someone can argue on meta. Yeah, we might win that argument, but it doesn't look good after enough meta posts.

There's a fine line between talking about / trying to promote the room and... well, spamming and pissing people off. How do we / should we advertise the room? Does it make a difference if it's main or Meta? Should we have any guidelines on the matter?source

I would just make it simple and say: We don't promote it. But we also don't hide. If someone asks who we are or if there is a chat room for moderation we can link to our room. But we don't need to run around and promote our room. This would also make sure we don't have 200 people in the room posting stuff.

I would be really careful with diving into this. Documentation is still in its early stages, with lots of feature-requests, lots of complains, even temporary bans and practically no real or official guidelines on what it is to moderate Docs. The only thing clear-cut would be plagiarism.

I can totally understand that people don't want to moderate things they don't understand. But plagiarism, spam, etc don't require much understanding to ping a mod about. If the people who are willing to help moderate Docs would do a little bit, I imagine that would help the mods out significantly.

Quality should probably not be moderated by the room; quality has a messy definition. But clear-cut things like spam and plagiarism can be dealt with effectively by a few members of the room looking for them occasionally.

@Undo MSO is quite swamped now with documentation stuff. I already stated once, that seems to be an indicator that there are things going seriously wrong, and it's essentially a banana rollout strategy (ripes when arrives customer).